Ceres

By Brooke Barton, Senior Director, Food and Water, Ceres Cape Town may reach “zero water day,” this June and literally turn off the spigot for some four million residents. Prolonged drought in South Africa is a major factor in the city’s water crisis, which is a foretaste of what other municipalities around the world…

By Eliza Roberts Manager, Water at Ceres Preliminary estimates for the costs of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria are in the hundreds of billions of dollars range—from disruption of business, to infrastructure and property damage, to crop losses. Each of the deadly storms hit agriculture especially hard, from cattle and soy in Texas, to citrus…

By Anisha Anantapadmanabhan Manager, Water Infrastructure, Ceres As Hurricane Harvey floodwaters recede, and Houston begins the long, expensive road to recovery, its civil engineers and city planners can learn from other cities that are embracing a sustainable water movement. Engineers, planners and financiers are coming together in many cities across the U.S. under a sustainable…

By Brooke Barton Senior Program Director, Water & Food Programs, Ceres More than half a billion people today lack access to clean water, and with climate change, water pollution and booming population growth, pressures on limited water supplies are ratcheting up. Tackling the water crisis can feel like an uphill battle in the United States, with one…

By Karen Yacos Director, Water Infrastructure, Ceres The Sonoran desert, where rainfall averages just nine inches per year, may seem like an unlikely place for a high tech company with big water demands to settle. But Chandler, Arizona is precisely where Intel Corporation has chosen to develop its second largest manufacturing facility in the United…

MARICOPA, AZ — In this patchwork quilt of irrigated green farms tucked into a vast expanse of desert, cacti and mesquite, it seems improbable that water-loving vegetables could be sustainably produced on a large scale. Yet Arizona is second only to California as the country’s largest grower of lettuce, spinach, melon and other such crops….

WATSONVILLE, CA—Lettuce is a thirsty crop in parched California. It takes roughly 12 gallons to grow a single head, and Chris Willoughby, a mid-sized grower of leafy greens, broccoli and cabbage, is doing his best to cut back on that amount. When his wells ran salty 10 years ago, following decades of regional groundwater over…

NEWMAN, CA – California’s drought is challenging for all farmers, but it’s especially daunting for growers like Barat Bisabri, who is being forced to re-think his entire business model when it comes to water. “It’s not sustainable if it stays this way,” said Bisabri, who has seen a 10-fold jump in his water bills the…

By Brooke Barton Senior Program Director, Water Program, Ceres It’s no secret that our agricultural industry is very thirsty, gobbling up 80 percent of the freshwater that America consumes each year. It takes a lot of water to feed the nation, and every five years we get an accounting of just how much it takes,…

Toledo, Ohio’s summer battle with toxic algae is just the latest in a string of weather-related catastrophes to beset our nation’s water and sewer systems. Hurricane Sandy’s unprecedented storm surge caused more than $500 million in damage to coastal water systems. Last year’s Arizona wildfires that killed 19 firefighters also devastated forested watersheds in a…

By Meg Wilcox Senior Manager, Communications, Ceres The Croatian Pride pushes off the dock and cuts slowly through the grey Gulf of Mexico, its engine growling. The air hangs thick and steamy, and the movement of the 40-foot oyster boat brings relief as it breezes past marshy areas where blue herons stand sentinel. The boat’s…

By Peyton Fleming Senior Communications Director, Ceres Joe Segura works for the electric and gas utility PG&E, but he sounds more like a farmer when you spend time with him. Driving around the drought-parched San Joaquin Valley here in California’s Central Valley, Segura winces as he describes groundwater wells “being sucked dry” and drives by…

By Peyton Fleming Senior Communications Director, Ceres Three years before the California drought became a national crisis, national berry giant Driscoll’s, on the state’s Central Coast, knew it had a major problem with water. It was disappearing. As a result, water rights lawsuits had become commonplace, water rates were rising again and the precious liquid…

Pricing is a powerful tool for shaping behavior, including water use. Recognizing the power of pricing, more water utilities are adopting water rates designed to encourage customers to conserve. These so-called “conservation rates” vary in form, but generally they increase the price per gallon of water the more water a customer uses. Across the country,…

Ames, Iowa – They don’t call it “The Corn State” for nothing. Within minutes of driving outside Des Moines, the landscape opens up. No hills. No buildings. Just farms. Sprawling farms, much of them planted with corn. And those tiny green shoots emerging last month from the dark rich soil represent a vast bounty. In…

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